The Former UK Minister Discovers How Apprenticeships and Support Networks Helped Slash Ireland’s Neet Rate

English primary schools to be told to identify children at risk of future unemployment. Alan Milburn is guiding a metal loop along the serpentine wire of an electrical buzzer game as he explains the challenge of Britain’s youth jobs crisis. We have got more than a million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet).

Crisis is an over-used word – but this is a crisis. On a fact-finding trip to Dublin, the former UK cabinet minister is being shown around an Irish Rail training facility. He tells the apprentices who rigged up the game that, while things are bad in Britain, Ireland is on the right track.

It’s about half the rate here, it’s fallen very rapidly. And we want to try to work out, what is that? There’s something going on; maybe there’s something you guys have been doing that we haven’t?

Alyx Tobin, one of the hi-vis clad trainees, chips in: Hopefully we can get to the bottom of it together? Over the past decade, Ireland has achieved the fastest reduction in Neet rates anywhere in the EU, from 14.3% in 2015 to 6.1% last year. That compares with a rise from 11.1% to 12.8% in the UK.

Romania is the only EU country with a higher rate. As he prepares to publish a report into the crisis for the UK government this autumn, Milburn has brought a delegation of officials, charity leaders, industry bosses and the mayor of South Yorkshire, Oliver Coppard, with him on the trip across the Irish sea. We’re here really to understand what the secret sauce is, he says.

The life chances of young people here are being transformed. You don’t have to go far – to the outskirts of Dublin – before you find huge pockets of deprivation and poverty. So nobody here would say, ‘We’ve got it solved.’ But there is definitely something different that we can learn from.

Back home, Andy Burnham has made tackling Britain’s youth jobs crisis a top priority, using his first weeks as prime minister to launch a series of measures to boost technical education and apprenticeships. Labour is also preparing for a fresh attempt at welfare reform amid concerns about the £125bn annual cost to the economy and public finances from the rise in youth worklessness. Under Keir Starmer, the government set targets to eradicate long-term youth unemployment and launched jobs programmes, grants and guarantees aimed at helping young adults to get into work.

However, business leaders argue Labour has made matters worse through tax increases, a rising minimum wage, and plans to strengthen workers’ rights. Employers have also faced other rising costs and weak consumer demand amid the cost of living crisis. In Ireland, part of the reason for the youth jobs turnaround is down to its economic recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. The country was among the biggest global casualties as the implosion of a property market bubble triggered a 10% crash in the economy in a single year and drove unemployment to 16% by 2012. Youth joblessness peaked at almost 30%, while many left to work abroad amid the 2010s eurozone debt crisis.